Tencent File photo: Xinhua

 
Chinese tech giant Tencent has made progress on three self-developed chips, according to Tang Daosheng, a senior executive vice president at Tencent during a meeting on Wednesday, as many Chinese tech enterprises seek to solve technology bottlenecks across the industry.

Tang said the new products include an artificial intelligent (AI) chip for inference, another for video transcoding and an intelligent network chip.

“Chips are the core part of hardware and the most core infrastructure of industrial Internet,” Tang said, adding that Tencent will always make active exploration with long-term investment.

In 2020, Tencent established a laboratory for chip research and development. The company has invested in AI chip start-up Enflame, which released the second generation of chips, expected to mass production at the end of 2021.

Tencent is not the only company to develop its own chips. In order to advance breakthroughs in leading-edge technologies in semiconductor industry, many Chinese tech enterprises have began to invest in chip research.

On October 19, Alibaba launched a new self-designed server chip, which has already been taped out in July and will be deployed in the Alibaba Cloud data center. On August 18, Baidu announced that its second generation AI chips have entered into mass conduction for intelligent transportation systems.